Our Infrastructure

Technical Notes

Our Infrastructure

Team: The systems have been built by a team of three full-time senior engineers, professional testers, several programmers, usability experts, a visual designer, technical writers, and a social media editor. In addition to the core team, we tap subject-area experts from within LBNL's Energy Technologies Area. Experts from Oak Ridge National Laboratory are participating in the development of multifamily technology, and others from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are conducting independent accuracy assessments.

Back-end Code: The Home Energy Saver APIs are written in php in a Model-View-Controller architecture using Zend Framework,with the exception of the DOE-2 simulation software, which is written in Fortran. A series of APIs connect the GUI to the back end infrastructure.

Database: Session data are held in a MySQL database.

Hosting: The entire HES API system is developed and hosted in the Amazon Web Services computing environment.

Backup: By virtue of hosting our infrastructure in a cloud-computing environment, our code and data are in effect continuously backed up and distributed in a highly disaster-resilient manner. In addition we backup the database to another cloud region; retaining weekly copies for 30 days and the first backup of the month after that.

Business Continuity: Business Continuity Planning focuses on sustaining our viable research and operations functions during and after an adverse event. It includes proactive advance planning and preparation necessary to rapidly resume our research and operations following a disruption of any size or type. Our Business Continuity Plan can be found here.